Alice left the food and closed the door quietly behind her.
My wolf was restless.
Mate in danger.Can’t find the source.Can’t protect what I can’t see.
That familiar scent from the crime scene nagged at me.I ran through everyone I knew, mentally cataloguing.Bratva contacts.Enemies I had made over the years.The Diamantis vampires who had been probing hotel security.The kind of threats I had been trained to hunt.Nothing clicked.
The hotel staff barely registered as suspects.They had been here for years, most of them.Loyal to the Hughes family, loyal to Lena.My security assessment had flagged no concerns.
I tried again.Vendors who visited regularly.Delivery drivers.The maintenance contractors who came in monthly.The scent wasn’t any of them, but it wasn’t unfamiliar either.
The scent was there, a ghost at the edge of recognition, refusing to solidify into a face or a name.
Whoever had killed Stephanie had been in that room.Had left their mark on the scene even as they tried to cover their tracks.My wolf knew that scent, had encountered it somewhere, and couldn’t place it.
The frustration was maddening.I paced the length of my study, trying to force the connection.The hotel was a crossroads of a thousand scents every day.Guests, vendors, delivery drivers, maintenance workers.Anyone could have been in that storage room over the past week, their traces layering over each other until individual threads became impossible to separate.
My wolf growled, wanting a clear trail to follow.But this wasn’t the forest.This was civilization, where prey knew how to hide among the crowd.
I needed evidence, not instinct.Whoever had done this would slip up eventually.They always did.
Above me, I heard footsteps.Her footsteps, moving through her room, the shower turning on.Was she trying to wash off the day the way she had tried to wash off last night?The thought of her under that water, the spray running down skin I had tasted just hours ago, made my wolf whine with a need I couldn’t satisfy.
I didn’t go to her.
Last night she had come to me because she chose to.If I went to her now, it would be me pushing, me demanding.She had made it clear she needed to set the pace.That single flinch when I had touched her face, that one word.Don’t.
She wasn’t ready for tenderness.Not from me.Not yet.
So I waited.
The house settled around me, quiet except for the occasional creak of old wood.I listened to her footsteps overhead, tracking her movements the way my wolf tracked prey.Kitchen.Hallway.Back to her room.
She didn’t come downstairs.
I told myself it didn’t matter.I told myself that one night didn’t mean she had forgiven me, that hate-sex was just bodies, that I had no right to expect anything more from the woman I had betrayed.
But she had said it.Not to me, but I had heard it anyway.In the rhythm of her heartbeat when she had come to my study.In the way her scent had changed when I opened the door.
This was the only place that was safe.
She hadn’t meant for me to know.The words had been internal, a thought she believed was private.But wolves hear things humans don’t.We feel the pulse of blood through veins, catch the subtle shifts in scent that betray emotion, sense the vibrations of words spoken only in the mind.And the bond building between us carried her truth to me like a whisper across a crowded room.Whether she acknowledged it or not.
She had come to me because I was safe.Not despite what I was, but because of it.The monster she should fear was the one she had turned to when everything else fell apart.
She’ll come again.When she’s ready.And I’ll be here, waiting, patient as only a wolf could be when guarding what mattered most.
I finished the whiskey I had poured and stared at the empty glass.Somewhere in Paradise Peaks, a killer was walking free.Someone who knew this hotel, knew its secrets, had taken a life to protect whatever agenda they were serving.
I would find them.I would tear them apart.And then I would lay the answer at Lena’s feet like the offering it was.
This was the grovel she couldn’t see.The protection she didn’t know she needed.The devotion I couldn’t explain because the truth would only make her feel obligated rather than loved.
But someday she would understand.
Someday she would see all of it.
And maybe then, she would let me touch her face without flinching away.
